


across the western sea

by krasnyj, strigastrigastriga (krasnyj)



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Fae & Fairies, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Original Character Death(s), Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sidhe, Slow Burn, counting grains of salt, potato soup for the soul
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-05-12 15:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5670475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krasnyj/pseuds/krasnyj, https://archiveofourown.org/users/krasnyj/pseuds/strigastrigastriga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers, Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants, becomes something else before he becomes Captain America. Bucky tries to follow and learns that what they say is true, you can’t go home again.</p><p>AU, folklore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. when I die bury me in shoes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from st. james infirmary blues;
> 
> _You may search this whole wide world over  
>  But you'll never find another sweetheart like me, yeah_
> 
> _Take apart your bones and put 'em back together  
>  Tell your mama that you're somebody new_
> 
> -the white stripes

Bucky Barnes is fourteen. He’s starting to fill out in a way that it seems Steve never will. It’s springtime, and the city is finally thawing. He’s looking forward to spending more time outside again; he thinks the fresh air is good for Steve, and it’s fun to throw a ball around or climb on things while Steve is sketching, and there’s usually girls to talk to, and these days people who know they can’t get away with picking on Steve will hang around sometimes, and they all tell jokes or play stickball, they sneak into movies, they perch on stoops and chatter like birds until someone’s mother or sister starts hollering, and then they scatter like birds, too.

He’s on the way to Steve’s house, whistling a tuneless little ditty, wearing a new pair of shoes because he’s still growing, growing, growing. His mother keeps bothering him about seeing if Steve wants some of his old clothes, since Becky’s certainly not interested, and to let them gather dust in his closet would be wasteful.

It’s been about a week since they last spoke. Sometimes when the weather changes Bucky gets a bit sick, and this year it was worse than usual, so he told Steve not to come by, since Steve catches everything. He was asleep most of the time, but it sure feels like a lot of time  has passed since they last spoke.

In Steve’s apartment building, he takes the stairs two at a time, bursting with energy.

He’s not used to Sarah opening the door so slowly, just her fingers first, and then the door open a crack, so he can just see one eye, and then, glacially, the door opens enough for him to enter. It’s dark inside, the shades drawn, and the air feels hot and heavy. Bucky gets a good look at Sarah, her hair and her clothing in disarray; her eyes are rimmed with red and her mouth is tight.

“Steve isn’t well,” she says. “I’m… glad you’re here, but—”

There’s a small coughing sound from the other room and her head whips around. Bucky follows her into Steve’s bedroom, where Steve lies. His body barely makes a bump beneath the sheets. His fingers are long and slender and his face looks ancient, his skin like paper. He doesn’t even acknowledge Bucky, he just blinks when his mother puts her hand on his forehead, and then he shuts his eyes and lets out a little rattling sigh.

Bucky stays for forty minutes and it’s Sarah who sends him home. He’s not stupid, he knows she’s already grieving. She’s glad he was there to say goodbye, but it hurts to see this healthy young boy right next to her son, Bucky can imagine. He’s thinking about Sarah because he can’t think about Steve, who never even spoke to him. It wasn’t like being in a room with Steve at all, it was like he went into the wrong room and found a stranger lying there.

He doesn’t go home immediately. He walks aimlessly and finds himself on a pier, facing the ocean. The waves swell and crash, recede and crash and swell.

\+ + +

Steve is alone on the fire escape, and then he isn’t.

An extraordinarily beautiful man is crouching next to him, examining him closely.

“You’ve fine bones,” the man says, in words that Steve knows aren’t English, but he understands them all the same. It’s like listening to branches stirred by a breeze or the rushing of a creek overflowing from a heavy rain.

“My teeth?” Steve finds himself asking stupidly.

“Those as well,” the man answers, taking hold of Steve’s chin and angling his face this way and that.

“Excuse me,” Steve says, trying to sound stern, because he doesn’t appreciate being appraised like a horse by a strange man with very cold hands.

“Nay,” says the man, “We’ll take leave together.”

And they do: it’s like slipping under the surface of water; Steve feels heavy and buoyant at once, and the sun spins in the skies above. He tries to cry out for his mother, but the air is ripped from his lungs and he has no voice.

\+ + +

Very few people show up at the funeral. Bucky’s whole family is there, of course, and they gather around Sarah, who seems to have aged an entire generation since Bucky saw her last. He hasn’t cried yet, but he can feel it inside of him, like the edge of a cliff crumbling. This feels worse than losing his father, because he can’t conjure up now how raw and helpless he felt when his father died, and his brain wasn’t full of all of the words he has now, and Steve’s voice, and all of their plans and promises.

But Steve didn’t speak to him that last day, and it burns.

He speaks to Sarah after the service, alone, asking his mother and sister to go ahead without him.

She’s very tired, but she still hears what he’s unable to ask, and she says, “James, it was not your fault. Do not hold yourself responsible for this. Steve was well for several days after he saw you. This happened overnight – he went to sleep early, and he woke up sick, and you saw him the day after – it happened so quickly.” She chokes, tears spilling. “You were always such a good friend to my son.”

And then he’s crying, because he can feel how much she hurts. “I should have been there,” he says, when he can speak. “I should have gotten better sooner.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says again. “It wasn't - wasn't. If I didn’t know better, I would say he was stolen by the fair folk.”

“What’s that?” Bucky asks.

“A tale we used to tell in the old country,” she says, “The fairies take children and leave changelings. It was a way for people to make sense of something like this.”

Bucky can tell she doesn't care to linger on those thoughts, so he listens while she remembers little things that Steve used to say or do, and he chimes in with his own memories, and his tears dry up. He walks her home and she insists that he take one of Steve’s sketchbooks, one that’s filled mostly with little pencil Bucky drawings, running and throwing and stretching and laughing, posing for Steve.

Bucky doesn’t believe in magic or witches of fairytales, but he’s awash with grief and he’ll believe anything that might bring Steve back. He goes to the library, and it’s strange and quiet and lifeless without Steve, and he has to ask for help with the card catalogue and he can hear the librarian thinking – she’s too polite to say it, but she’s thinking that he’s too old for this sort of thing, that there’s something queer about him. Think what you want, he doesn’t say. She still helps him. He reads about Tam Lin, or Tamlane or Tam-a-Line, and a lot of it doesn’t make much sense to him, and neither does the book of gruesome German fairytales, and that’s not helpful at all, so he focuses on the books that are based on Scotland or Ireland, and they’re none of them very helpful: there’s no math or science to fairies.

What Bucky gets from all of it is that you mustn’t eat their food and they have to accept any trade you offer and if Steve is under the fairies’ thrall, he has to hold Steve and not let him go when the fairies turn him into all kinds of monstrous forms. Also, they might want to just sacrifice Steve to the devil, because sometimes they’re supposed to do that.

He leaves the library feeling foolish, which becomes sorrow, because he’s too old to be acting like a child: Steve is dead. He was never well, and he probably got sick from Bucky, and then Bucky wasn’t there, and now it’s his fault that Steve is gone, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.

As he leaves, he thanks the librarian, but he feels cold and hot and it’s dark outside and he wasn’t ready for that.

He goes home, but it doesn’t feel quite like home any more.

Pneumonia takes Sarah. There’s nothing left of Steve, except for the sketches, and Bucky wishes Steve had had the vanity to make just a few drawings of his own face. He can’t draw and he doesn’t have pictures, so he’s going to forget. When he’s forty, what will he feel when he thinks of his childhood friend? Anything? Maybe he’ll sleep better, at least.

He gets a job on the docks. He packs boxes and picks them up and puts them down and he listens to the waves. He fills out paperwork and he collects his pay and he goes home. Sometimes he’s got cuts and bruises and Rebecca helps him wash and bandage the worst of them. She’s always asking him to flex and then teasing him for being a show-off. He knows that in a few years he’ll go to bars, and home should be his own place so he doesn’t have to face his ma when he comes home drunk. He might get married and have a son and name him Steve and, hell, that kid’ll probably have dark hair and Bucky’s dark eyes and win every fight and live to be a hundred, god bless him.

These thoughts used to hurt like a knife, but now they’re comforting. They make him feel numb. Time passes, life goes on.

But the first time he gets really drunk, knock-down blackout  _really drunk_ , he’s seventeen and he gets into a fight he knows Steve would have picked and he breaks some guy’s nose and he gets kicked out of the bar, and he winds up on Steve’s grave weeping freely about how he shoulda been there, forgive me, I can’t.

He doesn’t say anything about fairies, because that’s a distant dream, long gone from his mind, but maybe thirty minutes pass and he’s leaning on the tombstone, the whole world spinning, and he’s mostly trying not to throw up (although he thinks Steve would understand) and there’s a woman sitting next to him, pale, luminescent in the moonlight. She’s very slender, with long, flowing hair, and her eyes are sharp. Bucky doesn’t notice her for a while, so she lays her hand on top of his. Her nails are long and pointed.

He slurs something that's supposed be “what the hell” and she laughs and it’s like bells.

She says, “You do miss your friend so, don’t you.”

And he says, “Fuck you.”

She lets out another peal of laughter and says, “Oh no, not tonight. I’m just so curious, would you do anything to see your friend again?”

And he says, “It’s not a joke,” and he’s almost angry enough to see straight. She swims in his vision, which must be why she seems to be transparent.

She agrees that it’s not a joke and continues, in a somber voice, “I won’t repeat this offer, boy. Heed me. I will take you as my champion and knight, and when you best my enemy in battle, you command the fate of your friend.”

“I’m _drunk_ ,” Bucky says.

“YES or NO?” The woman’s voice swallows up everything in the world. “Answer me now.”

“Yeah,” Bucky whispers, hoarse. “Hell yeah.”

When the woman smiles, her teeth are too sharp and many. She kisses him, nipping at his mouth with those terrible teeth. There’s nothing erotic about the hungry way that she sucks on his lips, and he can taste his own blood on her tongue. The kiss seems to last for an eternity, during which he sobers up quite a bit, and when it finishes he finds that though his hands are still wet from the dew on the grass of the grave, he is in a bed, and alone. His head hurts.

He doesn’t mean to sleep, but he feels too weak when he tries to stand, and after collapsing, he can’t help but close his eyes.

And then, it seems, he is dead to the world.


	2. sleep is the image of death

“spring renews everything, and only I grow old”

-from an old poem (蜻蛉日記)

 

When Bucky wakes up, he’s still drunk. Maybe a bit hungover. He’s in a stranger’s bed, presumably a woman’s, and nude. And covered in small cuts and bruises. It doesn’t all gel together for him, but he kind of congratulates himself at the same time he’s noticing how the bed seems to be stuffed with feathers or straw from the way it’s sticking into him all over, which makes him feel like it’s time to get dressed.

His head swims when he sits up, so he waits a minute before he risks standing. He still feels like he’s about to step off a dock and into the waves, but after a moment or so it seems like he’s got his sea legs. He staggers around the room, picking things up and setting them back down harder than he means to. There’s something wrong with the room, like this is the kind of girl he’d only go home with after drinking himself blind.

_You’re a real gentleman_ , he can hear Steve saying.

_And you’re dead_ , is how he’d answer, because today seems like it’s not going to be a great day and somehow that’s Steve’s fault. And sometimes Bucky’s just not very nice, lately.

But still, what kind of broad keeps jars of teeth? There are too many for them to be hers, unless something has really gone wrong here. By a dusty mirror, there’s bits of wood and rock, carved with looping, knotted designs. It’s hard to see himself, but Bucky’s reflection looks like he lost a fight. His knuckles are raw, he notices. Who was he hitting?

He’s finally struggling into his skivvies when the door creaks open.

The woman who enters the room is nothing like what he’s expecting. She has glossy black hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. There are strings of pearls woven through her hair on golden strands. Her skin is pale, her lips bloodless and her eyes are large and luminous.

“Dress yourself, you wretched lush,” she snarls at him, crossing her arms and angling her face away.

Ah.

Theda.

His body seems to reject this world. As soon as he looks away, all of his memories wash off.

If Steve isn’t dead – and all Bucky has is her word, this witch – then he’ll “look different,” she told him. “He’s been here longer than he was gone,” she says. He watches her lips form words so he’s not really thinking about what she’s said. Sometimes when he looks at her he sees beauty, and sometimes madness.

He ate their food, she says, like she isn’t one of _them_.

Bucky doesn’t eat their food. He eats Cracker Jack and candy bars, cans of spam, cans of beans. Things they’ve been collecting for years, things that _keep_. He doesn’t look for dates any more, doesn’t want to know. Tries not to look sullen when he watches them eating fresh meat, drinking milk with drops of blood mixed in. Not that he wants that, blood in his milk (although, shouldn’t that bother him more?), but he misses chocolate milk. Misses warm hot dogs and malted milkshakes. Misses Rebecca and his mother and baseball and watching Steve draw.

He knows why he doesn’t eat their food, from those stupid ancient children’s books he pored over once, so long ago, when he believed in fairytales. He thinks about Steve eating, Steve cramming soda bread and parsnip soup and lamb into his mouth, downing glass after glass of ale. He imagines that Steve gets sloppy and rivulets of ale pour down his chin and stain his shirt. His chin is greasy from the meat he’s eating. It’s not really Steve, who never had much of an appetite and learned pretty quick that stiff drinks didn’t agree with his constitution. It’s kind of funny that it’s nice to think about Steve’s face, even if it’s a gross and odd thought.

He was drinking because of what she said.

That even if Steve’s alive, he’s someone else.

Okay.

Right.

So… Bucky’s crazy, right?

He’s here because he’s crazy. He’s not _really here_. He’s inside of his own head. There’s no other – no way that this is real.

“You’re worthless,” Theda says, slapping him. “You drank too much. That was all of your whiskey, boy.”

What she means is, the next time he needs stitches or has to have a bone set, what’s he going to drink to take the edge off? It’s a good question.

Maybe he was drinking because that seems to be the only time when Steve is still alive, when he believes he’s really here to rescue his friend. Other times, he begins to think that he’s actually going to work every day, and eating dinner with his family, and collapsing on his couch because he can’t make it to his bed. That in this moment, which seems so real, he’s only caught in a fevered dream. That’s why he keeps losing time, getting confused about when things happened. Maybe he’s going to walk past some beautiful dame on the street, spin on his heels, invite her out, fall in love, and then he won’t need these dreams. (And he’ll bury Steve again.)

That’s a theory he has, and he keeps circling back to it when he starts to just – get overwhelmed.

But he’s here now. He’s slipping into the rough linen shirt he discarded on a steamer trunk and a pair of wide-legged, cuffed trousers Theda must have stolen from some college kid. Rebecca would make fun of him for the ugliness of the outfit, and Steve would probably be bent over laughing hard enough to make himself sick just to see Bucky in those pants. Theda wants him to stop wearing old rags and keeps trying to get him to wear this bathrobe-type, dress-like garment, which he thinks must be a joke she is playing on him.

Everything is lit by candles. There are no windows. The walls and floor and ceiling seem to be made from dirt, kept in place by, what? Magic? When there is a damp smell, Bucky assumes that it’s raining aboveground. There are roots, some of them like grasping fingers reaching out from the earth and some of them spread across the wall like webs, or lace. There are old crones and young girls, spinning and weaving and grinding meal and sweeping. They seem to live in the corners, and he’s never seen anywhere that any of them might sleep. They look at him and mutter and look away.  

All of Theda’s things look old and worn because she doesn’t get many offerings, now. The first time they rode out into the night, she was wearing a long black dress and a gossamer shroud with strings of pearls sewn in a diamond pattern. She was disconcertingly bloodless and corpselike. Bucky was wearing a heavy sweater and still his ears and nose froze as the biting night air whipped through his hair, their black steeds tearing up clods of earth with every pounding step. Bucky’s heart was in his throat the entire time, having never before ridden a horse. There was a heavy iron sword strapped across his back, something from one of Steve’s comics.

He didn’t have to use it, that night. They slowed, trotted past a cemetery, and came to a halt by a circle of mushrooms. He kept looking at Theda, raising his eyebrows and waiting for an answer, but she just climbed down from her horse. Her feet were bare, and there were more pearls wrapped around her ankles. Someone had left a lit candle in the center of the circle surrounded by a full picnic spread – little cakes, biscuits with butter and jam and cups of tea. There was even a bottle of red wine.

Bucky got to eat all of it. He’d had a few lean days, so as soon as Theda told him why it was okay – that the food came from his world, and the spirit of the offering served as a tether between here and there – he crammed one of the cakes into his mouth. He was eating with his fingers, half-wild. There was jam smeared on his shirt and butter on his nose. Theda rolled her eyes and pulled her wrap around herself more tightly.

The teacups, plates, and candlestick holder showed up later, back in their burrow. He doesn’t even remember the ride back – he’d been drinking the wine, too.

And now he’s used to it, riding the horse and swinging the sword. The iron dispels shrieking wights and the small men in the bloody red hats. He doesn’t have to keep the blade sharp, and according to one of the withered old women, it’s not a very good sword, anyway. She teaches him how to sharpen it, and he enjoys the meditative, repetitive aspect of the exercise. He has to pay careful attention, and sometimes he still cuts himself, but there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in seeing that he’s done the job well.

He imagines how Steve might be different, what the first thing he says should be. If Steve is scared, or if he’s happy or having an adventure or what. What if he doesn’t want to be rescued?

Just focus on what you’re doing, he tells himself.

What if he looks at Bucky and doesn’t _see_ Bucky? What if he looks right through him and says nothing and walks away? What’s Bucky left with, then?

Well, he has a sword. So there’s that.

 

\+ + +

_(Iomhaigh am bháis codhla)_

\+ + +

 

There’s a storm. The windows rattle in their frames, and there’s nothing soothing about the rain. It’s difficult for Steve to sleep. It’s night and then it’s morning and there’s frost creeping across the panes. Steve touches his fingertips to the cold glass. He can’t see out. Sorrow sluices through him, but he can’t name the origin of his grief.

There’s a sound behind him and he turns: it’s Bucky, standing in the doorway. He’s smiling but there’s a thin line of blood dripping from his nose down to his chin.

Steve takes a few big steps to close the distance between them and curls his hand around the back of Bucky’s neck, pressing their foreheads together. Their noses bump and he can feel Bucky’s breath, smell the iron in his blood.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks, and his voice comes out in a thin whisper.

“I made a promise,” Bucky says, but he says it without sound, just his mouth moving, and Steve can feel the words in his ribs. Bucky’s fingers are running over his chest, playing with the buttons of his shirt and his collar, his throat, and then Bucky tilts Steve’s head up slightly and they’re sharing breath, both mouths open, almost touching.

Steve wakes up with the feel of Bucky’s lips on his own. He presses his fingers to his mouth like he can trap the feeling, but it’s already gone. He’s sweating and his heart is pounding and he feels like his body is too small and he needs to crawl out of it. He can feel his chest expand with every harsh breath echoing in his head. These dreams always make him feel like he’s going to throw up or cry.

He’s been woken by horns, deep in the woods. They always sound melancholy to him, and after all, they do signal a death. It’s like there’s no breath in his body, and for a moment he curls up, depleted. He’s had dreams about Bucky before, about Bucky’s mouth and skin and smell, but not here, not for such a long time. It’s worse now, because Bucky is gone. Steve never needed to share how he felt, it was fine just to be in the same space. To know that Bucky was there.

It was something he figured he’d grow out of, something that came from sharing a bed in the winter when Steve could never get warm enough or having only one friend, someone who was so good that you didn’t need any other friends.

The horns echo and he gets to his feet, longs for the sun. It’s still evening, and the rain seems to have exhausted its fury, falling in a gentle patter. He taps his fingertips to the window, and the glass is cool. He doesn’t want to be alone in this room.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really meant to update this over the holidays... I wrote this chapter out of guilt. expect the next update in a decade? for some reason, I feel like I need to do very extensive research to know what I'm talking about, but I didn't do that, I just read a poem about Cúchulainn. I'm also trying not to focus too much on original characters! aiyiyi. much love and appreciation to anyone who's reading.


	3. the waste land

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I, the worst

_After the torch-light red on sweaty faces / After the frosty silence in the gardens / After the agony in stony places / The shouting and the crying / Prison and place and reverberation / Of thunder of spring over distant mountains / He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience_

( _the waste land_ , v. what the thunder said - t.s. elliot)

\+ + +

 

They’re riding through heavy fog. The grass underfoot is green enough, but every tree that looms suddenly out of the thick clouds is blackened and dead. Occasionally, they cross over patches of barren, sandy earth. With so little of their surroundings visible, Bucky has no idea where they are. He can’t make a picture of it in his head, can’t project where they might be going. As far as he knows, this could be the end of the world.

Bucky’s horse seems anxious, sometimes slowing so that Theda disappears from view and sometimes bursting ahead, making Bucky feel foolish. He is not a good rider and the horse can sense his discomfort. Theda is wearing one of her diaphanous gowns and holds herself with poise. She doesn’t acknowledge Bucky as he has to reign his horse in, but she does sometimes slow so that he can catch up.

He wouldn’t speak the words out loud, but he is worried about getting separated. He would be entirely lost, and there are strange sounds coming out of the swirling mist. They’ve been riding for days, or only hours, he cannot tell. She went to a church to look at a skull and he thinks that if he’d had the guts, he could have fled then. He had to wait outside and he thinks maybe, even though it wasn’t America, it was _the real world_. The skull had teeth made of gold. Bucky wasn’t supposed to see, but he did.

The man holding the skull must have been making the mouth move like that, like it was talking. There was gold foil around the eye sockets. Bucky had to look away, then. But later, there was a silk bag dangling from her saddle, and it was like he could hear those teeth chattering with every step.

On the way there, she’d said, “My people are dying. Were dying. Will die.” She never explains things to him, but perhaps she’d been so absorbed in her own thoughts that she forgot her audience; “We are all dying,” she’d murmured.

That got him thinking about time. He knows time has passed, but he couldn’t say how much. And he sort of feels like they’re outside of time, here, like, his experience is linear. But where he _is_ , could have happened thousands of years ago. He has the thought, and then it confuses him. He’s been feeling lost, lately, forgetting the sound of his own voice. It seems like someone else is inside his head, thinking someone else’s thoughts.

He doesn’t even notice when he falls from the horse until he hits the ground. He didn’t think he was tired or disoriented, more than normal, nor was he in pain. Or was he? She’s standing over him, reins in her hand, saying something, but her voice is too faint and when her jaw moves, he can’t see the shape of the words.

 

\+ + +

 

He hasn’t seen himself in a mirror in – how long has it been, exactly? The man staring back at him has dark, damp hair and pale skin, leached of all color. Only his lips are red, and there are shadows under his eyes. He’s got one hand wrapped around the back of his neck, so his meaty forearm is perfectly positioned for examination: there are only three thin red lines, easy to miss. He killed the pixie that scratched him, and he hadn't thought any more of it.

He’s in better shape than he was working on the docks, maybe because he’s always half-starved and can’t drink as much. With every subtle shift, muscles move under his skin. It feels like he’s watching himself from Steve’s eyes, like he’s looking at something that needs to be captured: all the lines and shadows every motion creates, it's like art. This, the being before him is so unfamiliar…

What would Steve think, if he could see this? Would he think, “Hang on, let me get my pencils,” or would he turn away? Would he look at Bucky and think, that man is a killer? He would have called Bucky _stupid_ and _moron_ for not noticing he was poisoned, but that would be because of worry. Because of love.

The thought hurts. Bucky looks at himself and now all he sees is a hungry, tired boy.

Theda strapped him to his horse somehow and they rode until they got somewhere she could craft an antidote, or something. He remembers seeing Steve. Maybe it was a dream, or a vision. He’d never seen Steve as scrawny, exactly, but there was always something about Steve, the way he moved, like he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. So that always colored how people saw him, no matter what was underneath all that.

But this Steve was glorious. The sun was behind him and it lit his hair like a golden halo. He didn’t move or speak, just stared. His gaze was commanding, his bearing regal. He wasn’t smiling. His eyes were so blue.

If Bucky met that Steve, now, he wouldn’t know what to say. His breathing gets shallow just thinking about it. That Steve wouldn’t want anything to do with Bucky, with his new scars and the way he hesitates before he enters a room and how he wakes up in the night, breathing harshly, with tears in his eyes. And he used to make jokes, but now he goes for days without speaking. He doesn’t even need to ask questions, any more. The last time he did, he wanted to know why Theda always wore pearls.

Unhelpfully, “These are pearls that were his eyes,” she said.

 

\+ + +

 

After everything, after nearly dying, they came back and the men were there. Their faces were streaked with blue paint and their chests were bare, so Bucky saw the tip of his spear going in – angled as he knows it must, so as not to get stuck in the ribs – the spear impaling the man, his heart.

He’s not really a man, Bucky knows, replaying the memory, like Theda’s not some regular dame.

So that means it was okay.

He had to move around Theda to see what she was hollering about, and the girls were screaming, hands over their eyes. They’d gathered all of Theda’s books into a pile in the eating area, and they were trying to set it on fire when Bucky stepped into the room. Whoever they were, they might have come to hurt the fluttering young girls and the feeble, weathered crones, and would they have let the black-and-white cat and the horses burn in the fire? 

The spear is new to Bucky. It’s heavier than the sword and he doesn’t like it as much. He's still learning how to use it. He doesn’t like the feel of it, unwieldy, but in that moment there was something serene about gripping it tightly in both hands and letting all of his anger and surprise make his body move without any conscious thought, and then the... man was dead.

Well, he cried out. And there was blood and he was choking and then he was silent. And the other man rushed Bucky, bellowing like a bull, and Theda threw him the sword and he stabbed the man in the gut. The man’s forward momentum propelled him onto Bucky. It was a mess, a disaster. There was blood everywhere, and Bucky can still smell it and taste it in his mouth. He’s looking into the man’s eyes as he dies. He’s always looking into the man’s eyes.

And then he was the one who was screaming, he realized, recognizing his own voice coming out of his mouth.

That was yesterday. Now he’s outside, walking along the edge of the woods. The soil here is loose and soft, loamy. The trees grow thick, so their leaves obscure the sky. That’s why he’s not walking under the trees.

He remembers all the times Steve’s mother made Steve wear his coat even though the sun was shining and it was spring and the grass was all green. “You’ll catch a chill,” she used to say.

Somehow, it became Bucky’s job to make sure Steve stayed buttoned up, even though he’d never talked about it with Sarah. He just knew that she was right. It wasn’t that Steve was worried about how he looked, he was just angry about being frail. He’d glower at Bucky like his apple-cheeked hardy nature was a deliberate insult. Sometimes, wearing the coat, he’d get too hot. His hair would stick to his forehead and his cheeks would flush and when he glared at Bucky there was a kind of savage beauty about him. It made Bucky want to start a fight or run away or anything, he'd give anything just to not be thinking that when he was looking at Steve.

It’s stupid, but he’s never walked in grass wet with dew at night before and it’s the first time this place feels magical to him. The sky overhead is bright with stars, more stars than he’s ever seen in the city before.

 

\+ + +

 

Water swirls overhead. It’s entirely clear, and, where it reflects the sky, it’s blue and perfect, unlike the filthy water he’s known. The flood sweeps him along, lifting him off his feet easily. The water’s roaring in his ears. The sky looks like bedroom walls painted blue, but pieces of it have chipped off and flaked away. Those are clouds, Steve tells himself. He’s not having trouble breathing; he’s a fish, he’s a spirit. He’s somebody else’s wandering thought.

The waves break against a bleak shore. He stumbles to his feet, the cold water around his ankles beckoning him backwards, promising him a weightless sleep. The sandy, pebbled soil of the shore becomes loam beneath his feet, one in front of the other, step after step. There are no trees. It is a battlefield.

“My son,” Sarah says, standing next to him. There’s a crackling in his lungs when she speaks, like pneumonia. She takes his hand. There is a brilliant halo behind her head, she’s a work of art. Bernini. She’s an angel.

“Mom,” Steve says.

She puts a finger to her lips and her eyes narrow and he turns to see what she’s watching, feeling her slim, brittle fingers in his. He tightens his grip even before he sees, across the plain, two terrible armies breaking upon each other.

Wake up.

Brooklyn. The smell of trash that wafts along the streets, the boulevards, the back alleys. Roaches. White flowers on every surface in the room. Steve knows daisies, roses, lilies, but he can’t name all of the flowers, all the white flowers. The room is thick with the fragrance of flowers, so rich and heady it makes his head spin. He’s in bed, sitting up, his fingers loose on the cool sheets. He’s so tired, but he knows he’s been asleep for so long.

There’s a tall man, slender, with the most exquisite face. He’s watching Steve. There are ashes on his face, ashes flaking away from his skin. He’s wearing a silver circlet and smiling like the Mona Lisa, only half a smile. He’s standing in the shadows, just beyond the window and out of the light.

Steve looks across the room from the man, in the other direction, and there’s someone just leaning on the door frame. He’s not looking at Steve because his eyes are closed and he’s got the heel of one hand pressed to his nose and there’s blood, a whole lot of blood. His hair is dark and his skin is pale and Steve thinks if he opened his eyes they would be blue. They’ve met before, he knows that, but when he tries to think about it it’s like birds wheeling overhead. He can’t hold on to any of his thoughts except for blue eyes. Why is he bleeding? He won’t look at Steve.

Wake up.

Desk. School. Pencil in his hand. Taking notes. Trying to take notes, but he can’t see the board. He can’t hear the teacher. All of the desks are empty. The room is empty. There’s no light. Look out the window, it’s dark. There’s no one out there. They’re never coming back.

Wake up.

Snow. Staring into the sky, snow falls softly on his face. Snow catches on his eyelash and he blinks, feels the fallen snow resting on his skin, not melting. He’s suddenly unsure whether he’s lying on the ground in the snow or falling, somehow, towards the clouds and beyond the snow, up into a distant, vast black expanse.

Wake up.

The flood sweeps him along, lifting him off his feet easily. The water’s roaring in his ears. The sky looks like bedroom walls painted blue, but pieces of it have chipped off and flaked away. Those are clouds, Steve tells himself. He’s been here before.

Wake up.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mystery of mysteries. my plotting is crummy, I just like putting words together.


	4. between a wounded body and the overwhelming night

he is going under  
in spite of me  
and I will not leave  
dry land  
to go out after him

just before  
the doors close between us,  
his drowned voice speaks up  
from the sea-bed

_a lifetime,_ he says

( _another life,_ Louis De Paor, trans. Michael S. Begnal)

 

\+ + +

 

He doesn’t have a scene that he plays over and over until it feels right. There’s nothing he needs to say, and he doesn’t need to know why Steve left or where he’s been. If it’s something Steve wants to talk about, he’ll listen, of course. His whole plan from the beginning has basically been that things will go back to the way they were before, sitting on the stoop and playing ball in the park. Reading Steve’s comics, stuffing their shoes full of newspaper. Listening to Steve’s ragged breathing and feeling his own heart beating erratically, like a rabbit, knowing there is nothing he can do to fix it. Rubbing circles on Steve’s back and feeling his ribs right beneath the surface of his skin, because that’s all that Bucky can do in those moments. Drinking until he’s ossified and everything is dark around the edges and soft and beautiful. Before he wet his hands with blood.

After his wonder at the stars, at the feeling of the dew on his bare feet, he’s trying not to think about anything at all. He’s trying to notice every sound he hears, where it comes from, whether there’s any sense of danger; it’s something he wants to be good at, and there – there, in the corner of his eye, is Steve.

But only from the corner of his eye. He starts to call out as he turns, but the man standing in front of him, half-obscured by the trunk of a slender tree, is – someone else, so his voice dies in his throat. The man he’s looking at is the glorious vision, the haloed wraith, not his Steve. Steve was all awkward angles and a knobby Adam’s apple and hands that were too big for his frame, a concave and milk-white boy. He was a big smile and raw knuckles and black eyes. This fella, his face is familiar, and that’s why Bucky immediately thought: Steve, but everything else is wrong. His frame, the way he holds himself, the dazed look in his eyes.

The way Bucky’s seeing him, hungry for all these details, reminds Bucky of how he felt looking at himself: the shape of him, changed, like it was art. Like there could be art inside of him. (Steve was always art. He wouldn’t hear that the right way, though.) He’s also noticing that the stranger appears to be unarmed, but his loose clothing could conceal a dagger.

“I ran away from the house,” Steve says. (In Steve’s voice, but different.) “But I didn’t set it on fire.”

Bucky steps back, and then back again. Steve-not-Steve doesn’t move, except his eyes follow Bucky. It’s creepy.

“I ran away from the house,” Steve says. He really does sound like Steve. Sort of.

“But you didn’t set it on fire,” Bucky finishes. He’s graced with a most subtle upward turn of one corner of the stranger’s mouth.

The stranger is taller, with skin like someone who gets a lot of sun. It’s made his hair fairer, maybe, and his eyes look bluer than Steve’s. He’s not squinting, or flushed, or trying to pretend he’s just catching his breath. He’s Steve if someone ripped all the sick outta Steve and his lungs filled up with fresh air and for once he was well. It’s like a story from the pulps. 

“What house?” Bucky asks. “Why did you run away?”

Steve blinks and tilts his head. “Haven’t I seen you? Bleeding.”

There’s something about the way he says it, about all of the pieces coming together. “You’re not real,” Bucky realizes, wishing he could just believe it.

It doesn’t sound like an accusation, but Steve looks away.

There are all kinds of things here that appear as someone you want to see, someone you will trust, Bucky knows. Beautiful women, singing sweetly. Children holding lanterns. They need your help. They’re helping you, because you hadn’t realized you’d gotten lost. You follow them off the path, into the water, and that’s the last anyone hears of you. Could it come in the shape of an old friend? Certainly. But it means that someone is in his head; maybe it began when he was poisoned. This could be part of a plot, Theda’s paranoia finally making sense to Bucky. He hasn’t been feeling like himself lately, has he? Maybe all of this is only happening inside of his own mind.

He’s too tired to get upset that someone would try to use Steve to mess with him. There’s nothing he can do about it except find the source. And they got Steve all wrong, anyway. It makes him feel so sad, somehow, like the Steve plucked out of his thoughts is a betrayal to the real Steve. Now’s not the time for conversation.

He stalks through the forest, trying to present himself as purposeful and unafraid, waiting for the moment when the trees and the path start to repeat, so he knows he’s trapped in a dream or whatever game it is they’re playing.

Instead, he finds himself stepping out of the shade and onto a long flat shore, somewhere he’s never been before. There are smooth round stones by the water. He likes the rattling, rushing sound of the water draining from the stones as the waves recede. Heavy fog swirls over the surface of the water. Maybe it extends in all directions, and that’s the trap.

It was night, but now it’s day. It’s not bright, but the sky through the fog is light enough. Where did the time go? It can’t be a haunting –he can see that the grass is flattened in a trail of Steve’s footsteps. So, what is this? What’s happening to him?

What does he do now?

“I know you,” Steve(-not-Steve) says over his shoulder.

Bucky jumps, startled. He isn’t pleased that he let someone sneak up on him like that.

“I saw you before,” Steve says, “In the house. I thought then, ‘I know you.’ Don’t I?”

Bucky’s jaw drops, but there’s nothing to say.

“You were bleeding,” Steve says. He presses the palm of one hand to his own nose, which isn’t bleeding, and brushes his other hand against Bucky’s face. Chills run down Bucky’s spine. He wants to run but he can’t, he can’t move. Steve’s eyes are downcast, unfocused. He’s lost in a memory. Those are Steve’s eyes, and the lashes that frame his eyes, and the shape of the nose and the curve of his mouth – it’s all entirely, only Steve. They’re standing very closely. Bucky can hear the waves hitting the shore, the water retreating. It’s the kind of moment that lasts forever. He wants to lean into Steve’s touch; he’s afraid that Steve’s just going to pull his hand away.

They stay like that until Steve looks up, his gaze sharpening. He meets Bucky’s eyes and – it’s impossible to know what he sees. When he steps back, his absence registers as an unbearable coldness, like a void has opened between them.

“You look like someone I used to know,” Bucky says. His voice comes out thick, like he’s unused to speaking. It feels like he’s desperate, trying to bargain. Stay, and keep talking.

“I think I was dreaming,” Steve(-not-Steve) says. He sounds puzzled, suspicious. “How do I know this isn’t another dream?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself,” Bucky says, and he kind of laughs, just one weak “ha.”

Steve blinks at him again. There’s something really off about him, the way he’s talking and moving. He’s speaking with an accent, but it’s not Brooklyn. He sounds foreign.

“I don’t know where we are,” Steve says bluntly. “And I don’t know who you are. I think you know more than I do.”

“And here I was, thinking I don’t know anything at all.” It might have come across as a joke, before. Or – with the real Steve. He would have made some crack about how Bucky’s finally acknowledging it, or something. Instead, there’s no response. “I was looking for my friend,” Bucky goes on, when it’s clear that Steve expects something. “His name’s Steve.”

(But he doesn’t give Steve’s full name; true names mean something else here.)

It all comes tumbling out, awkward and painful. “I thought he was dead, but then someone told me he isn’t and I could save him, and I made a promise, and I think I shouldn’t have made that promise. I think something’s wrong with me, and I don’t know what he’s going to think when we meet again. I don’t even know if we’re going to meet again.”

“My name’s Steve,” the apparition says, idly. “It used to be. They don’t call me that anymore.” He’s looking off to his right, but then, in his uncanny way, his focus slips abruptly back to Bucky. “What did you promise?”

“I promised to be someone’s champion.” When he says it, his voice falters. It sounds ridiculous, put into words like that.

From different angles, depending on the light, Steve’s eyes are a kind of cool grey. It makes him seem unfriendly. Then he’ll shift and his eyes are blue and his mouth is red and his cheeks are kind of rosy. He looks so healthy and wholesome and young.

“You must have cared about your friend very much,” Steve-not-Steve murmurs.

“I do,” Bucky says, and he says it with as much feeling as he can muster. He wants Steve to feel it, if he’s really in there, if he’s anywhere out there, to hear this and to know that it’s the truth.

But the look Steve gives him is one of fear, or doubt. “I can’t stay,” he says. “I think they’ll find you, if you’re here for too long.”

“You keep saying ‘they.’ They who? Are they dangerous? Are they hurting you?” Without thinking, Bucky’s reached out to hold Steve by the shoulders. “You know where we are, now?”

Steve reaches up and curls his fingers around Bucky’s hands. “You have to let go,” he says.

 

\+ + +

 

Bucky wakes up. The sun is shining and he’s lying on a reasonably soft bed of moss and pine needles (which are not actually soft when they’re sticking into you). His head hurts and his throat is dry. He’s had worse hangovers. He gets to his feet gingerly and wonders what Theda’s going to say.

It must have been a dream, a strange dream, because he was so unhappy and lonely and guilty. He wanted to believe that he was really going to save Steve.

It’s not a long walk back; there’s no beach, no body of water. Only the woods, the sun, and a gentle breeze. The scene in his dream had been entirely silent, but there are birds in the trees. He’s been here for so long (how long?), but he doesn’t know anything about the area. He knows that there’s a crossroads nearby, a crumbling tower overgrown with ivy, and a low stone fence that starts and ends abruptly, fencing nothing in. He’s crafted a story, naturally: there was a castle here once. Everything he’s seen is all that’s left. Theda said they were dying.

Maybe Steve was telling him to let go metaphorically: give up. A message from himself, delivered like absolution from the only person who could let him let go. He doesn’t care for this much introspection. He’s beginning to feel insane again, like when he’d first thought that he was dead. For all he knows, he’s dead _and_ crazy, which seems unkind. He hopes that death doesn’t feel like this; maybe it will be quiet and peaceful.

When he descends into the coolness of their barrow, the cooking room is empty except for Theda, who is setting fires in small glass jars.

“You smell like you slept in a tree,” she says, without looking away from her work.

He gets a tin of Skippy peanut butter ( _Improved by Hydrogenation_ ) and a package of sliced bread. He makes himself a sandwich and perches on the ugly wooden chair with an uneven leg. It keeps rocking back and forth, thumping the packed dirt floor.

“How long has Steve been here?” he asks.

“Impossible to say.”

“How long have I been here?”

“It’s not _linear_ ,” she says, in the voice she uses when she wants him to realize that she’s being very patient and generous because he is really trying her.

“I think I’m changing, too.”

“Of course you are.” The smoke rising out of her newest jar smells foul.

“You did this to me,” he bristles. “I think it’s a bad change.”

“The bad change was drinking yourself into an early grave, you darling child,” she says. “You’re much stronger now.”

“I didn’t even know what I was promising,” he mutters.

“Entirely true.” She drops a pinch of something red into a jar, scratches out a few characters in blue ink on a piece of parchment, wraps it around a stick of cinnamon, and sets it on fire before dropping it into the jar as well. “You’ll know better the next time you make a promise, won’t you?” This time, the smell isn’t nearly as noxious, and there are black sparks in the smoke.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Nothing terribly devious,” she answers. “Are you feeling better? You have a leaf in your hair.”

He crams the last big bite of sandwich into his mouth and plucks the brittle leaf out of his hair. It’s a faded orange, and it disintegrates in his fingers.

“How am I supposed to save him?” he asks.

“You have to hold on and never let go,” she says. She’s facing away from him, but he can feel the thin line of her mouth. Sometimes he thinks that she can read his mind and is just fucking with him.

 

\+ + +

 

The cool sheets rustle as he rolls over and then sits up. Music echoes in his head, crackling and popping. (Why does it do that?) _Maybe millions of people go by / but they all disappear from view / and I only have eyes for you_. It’s unlike the music he’s used to here, but he thinks it was also made for dancing. He thinks that he was somewhere else, somewhere very far away.

He’s holding something so tightly that his hand hurts.

It’s a book of sketches, half full. One page is a drawing of a room reflected in a mirror. There’s a view of a street from a window above, an automobile drawn in painful detail, a flower, a person standing next to a bicycle. Buildings, train cars, a bridge. Then there are pages and pages of faces. An older woman who looks tired in one sketch and joyful in the next. She’s so terribly familiar, and he thinks it might be because there’s a bit of him in her face. Then there are two children seated together, leaning over a book. The boy is older, maybe teaching the girl how to read or reading to her. Then it is just the boy: smiling, sitting, leaning, stretching.

The sketches are all black and white, but he knows those eyes would be blue. He’s seen them, now.

It feels like his brain is a sieve. He remembers saying that he used to be called Steve, but he doesn’t know why he said it. He remembers the dark circles under the man’s eyes. He’d worn darkness like a heavy mantle. It was nearly tangible, a cloak draped from his broad shoulders. That comes new to him, a new way of seeing. Like how he’s been traveling – it leaves him with a terrible migraine, and even now he can see the effervescent crescent of light slashing through the empty room. He’s going to throw up. He’s not doing any of this deliberately.

But he has the book now, and he can make notes. He will not forget everything.

 

\+ + +

 

It only occurs to him later to ask where the bodies went.

“They were bog spirits,” Theda says. “We lashed them to the horses and dropped them back in the bog.” She’s sitting in front of a dusty mirror with a candle flickering on the table. One of the young girls is braiding her hair, threading it with strings of pearls.

“Bog spirits?”

The girl looks at him and mouths, almost silent, “Taibhseach.”

“They used to bring me bronze and gold. Their bodies were thrown in,” she says, “from _your_ side. Sacrifices, peut-être bien. They’re caught in the crossing. They might come back on either side. You needn’t feel so bad about it. They’re not really here or there. _I_ didn’t do anything to them, why must they bother me?”

It’s one of those things she says that might be true. He can’t verify it, he can only decide whether to believe it or not. Like the little men with their red hats: are they _really_ dyed with blood? Wouldn’t dried blood be all muddy and brown? “It’s always _fresh_ ,” she’d said, crossly. “They have to keep killing. Vicious little buggers.” And then she’d trampled a few with her horse, which had seemed particularly bloodthirsty that afternoon. It was one of those things he’s chosen not to remember very clearly.

“Why do you need a champion?”

“Haven’t your lungs run out of air? Are you going to follow me around all day asking questions?” She sounds cross.

“I should have started asking questions sooner,” he mutters. When he tries to recall the past, his thoughts have a hazy, smeared quality. He hasn’t been drinking _that_ much. 

He goes back to the little niche where he sleeps and sits on his bed, digging through the pile of odds and ends he keeps. There’s a large brooch with the pin missing, a feather, a tin whistle, and some lumpy, asymmetrical coins. He also has an Eagle Giant automatic pencil from the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco. It came in a blue box with the words printed neatly on the cover in gold. He assumes Theda got this from America; did she actually get it from San Francisco? He can’t imagine her being welcomed in her bare feet and diaphanous gowns. He’s never been to the west coast, but he wants to give it to Steve. When… if.

So he doesn’t use that pencil to write. He has some charcoal, which always makes an ungodly mess, but he doesn’t have any sentimental attachment to it, so he can use it freely. He doesn’t know how Steve drew so deftly with it.

Bucky means to put everything down on paper, to organize his thoughts in a permanent way, but no words occur to him. He finds himself drawing a horse, a potato shape with lots of lines sticking out of it to indicate legs and a mane and tail. If only he’d ever had some inclination for this. He tries to give it more weight, and now it’s more of a smudgy thundercloud. He keeps going until his scrap of parchment is covered in a thundering herd of spuds. His sense of purpose has entirely dissipated; this is why everything inside of his head is an angry smear.

Theda’s pearl girl walks past later and stops to look at what he’s working on. Her look of incredulity makes him laugh out loud.

“They collect a tithe,” she tells him. Her eyes are the violet color of lilacs. “Soon, you will know.”

 

\+ + + 

 

Brooklyn, summertime. Outside: bicycle bells ringing; children shouting at one another; cars zooming past; a train. All the sounds of people living their lives, fading into the background.

Inside: stillness. Dust motes flowing lazily through the bright patches of sunlight. Sweat in the small of his back, damp hair on his face. What a surprise, summer is hot. Steve is stretched out across his bed with the small, cheap set of watercolor paints he won at school. Before he begins painting, Steve stares at his piece of blank paper for a long time, like he’s visualizing every single stroke. He has to get the image fixed in his head before he starts because he’s afraid of wasting his little paints, that’s what Bucky thinks is going on. He’s seen how carefully Steve cleans his cheap brushes, how he uses pencils until they’re worn down to nubs. Meanwhile, Bucky’s ruining a pulp magazine with his sticky fingers; they shared a double-stick popsicle earlier, and it was Bucky’s turn to pick the flavor.

But, while Steve’s lost in thought, Bucky’s looking at him over _Black Mask_ , noticing that he’s just been thinking that Steve has the kind of mouth you want to kiss. He has the thought, and then he doesn’t want to think about it. His heartbeat quickens and his face flushes; he almost feels lightheaded from shame and delight. It’s an obscene thought, unforgivable. He immediately worries that he thought it so loudly that Steve heard it across the room, like it’s the kind of thought you can’t have without everyone noticing, but Steve remains concentrated on his paints.

He tells himself it’s because of the popsicle. Lips are lips are lips, everyone has a mouth. It’s not that he wants to kiss _Steve_ , it’s just that Steve’s lips look rouged like any dame’s right now.

Making that excuse is as bad as whoever spreads those rumors at school – first, that Steve is bent, because he’s small and smart and thinks about aesthetics, which is to say that he makes other people feel stupid sometimes, but not that he’s trying too, not in mean way, and second, that Bucky’s always looking out for Steve because they’re both queens and Steve does for Bucky.

It’s not a big deal for Bucky, because he’s already got a reputation with ladies (he can’t help it, he likes to flirt), and he can look out for himself if someone wants to make it personal, but Steve has always been different. Girls make him nervous, and he can’t talk to them right. Steve hears the rumors too, and he has to pretend like they don’t affect him, but it’s a sore point. Mostly because he doesn’t like it that everyone says Bucky looks out for him.

He’s afraid that if he thinks about it enough, he’s going to go too far. That it’s _already_ gone too far, because he’s been thinking about Steve’s _mouth_ and making excuses for himself. It’s not about anything Steve has done, it’s about what Bucky wants – when the thought never should have occurred to him – but it did, and it still does: he’d like to see if Steve tastes like cherry, his favorite flavor.

Steve looks up and catches him and goes, “What?” and gives Bucky a crooked little grin.

“I was just wondering how long it takes to paint a picture,” Bucky says.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the title of this chapter is also from "another life," and the untranslated excerpt from poem: 
> 
> tá sé ag dul faoi  
>             dem bhuíochas  
>             is ní fhágfaidh mé  
>             an mhíntír  
>             le dul amach ina dhiaidh
> 
> díreach sara ndúnann  
> doirse an dá shaol eadrainn,  
> labhrann a ghlór báite  
> aníos ó ghrinneall na mara 
> 
> _a lifetime_ , ar sé
> 
> wow who knows what will happen next!


	5. heart of stone

_The Queen of Faery turned her horse about,/Says, Adieu to thee, Tamlene!/For if I had kent what I ken this night,/If I had kent it yestreen,/I wad hae taen out thy heart o flesh,/And put in a heart o stane._

( _The English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ , Francis James Child)

 

**&**

 

It’s a bad day. Theda has them, occasionally. She says that her head hurts, and she has to lie down. The youngest, smallest girls put cloths soaked in cold water on her forehead and neck, because they can move the most quickly and quietly. He can smell lavender and something that he will someday recognize as eucalyptus, a scent that will always transport him to this cool, dark barrow. There are branches of dogwood in a vase in the corner.

Underneath her sheets, she is as small a shape as Steve was. Bucky notices this from outside the door, gazing in with nostalgia like a shard of ice in his heart. Her dark hair fans out across the pillow more elegantly than the sweaty hair that stuck to Steve’s face, and the fever high on her cheeks is becoming, not splotchy. Still. He feels an urge to go to her side and comfort her, and he knows, as he always did with Steve, that there really isn’t anything he can do. She cracks one eye open and beckons Bucky to enter.

He crouches by her side, his left arm tingling.

“We have to pay the tithe soon,” she whispers. “You’ll accompany me. It is your time, champion. And your friend should be there, too. Remember, you can’t let go.” Her voice is faint, and he knows it’s not the time to ask questions. He sits there, silently, until one of the girls nudges him towards the door.

Outside, the birds are quiet, and the frost-covered grass crunches beneath his feet. It feels like the world is trying to be quiet and still for her – it’s not the season for frost.

He doesn’t mean to go far, and he certainly doesn’t mean to fall into a hole. He’s not even sure how it happens: he’s looking out at the horses, and then he’s staring up at the small circle of sky overhead.

 _I don’t deserve this_ , Bucky Barnes thinks.

He hears the scuffling sounds of someone crawling towards him, but, for some reason, he just sits there, defenselessly. It seems like the sky is getting farther away, like the hole is getting deeper or Bucky is, somehow, still falling. The ground beneath him _feels_ solid. There’s a dreamlike quality to everything, and as in dreams, it doesn’t occur to Bucky to question anything.

“It’s so hard to find you,” Steve mumbles. There’s a pencil in his mouth. It’s the infernal version of him, but this time, the man doesn’t look like he’s enjoyed as much sun lately, and there’s a rust-red stain down the ribs on his right side. He’s still wearing loose, rough-spun clothes, and he doesn’t have the comforting, familiar smell of whatever soap Steve used to use.

“What happened?” Bucky asks, putting his hand on his own ribs.

“Ahh… sport,” Steve answers, which isn’t an answer. “I’m well now.” He spits out the pencil and holds it with a small sketchbook that Bucky remembers: with Rebecca’s help, he made it for Steve, collecting papers in all roughly the same size and sewing them together down the spine. They made the cover out of scraps of cloth.

Steve seems to notice Bucky’s gaze. “Yes,” he says, holding it up excitedly. “I found it. It helps me remember things.”

“Remember things?” Bucky echoes.

“I lose time,” Steve says, and then he goes, “Look, isn’t this you?”

It is. Looking at each page, Bucky remembers where he was in every drawing (this one after Christmas, at the promenade, in Owl’s Head Park, in Steve’s bedroom). He hadn’t noticed it before, but Steve had sort of stopped drawing everything else except for Bucky. And then he turns a page and it’s not familiar any more, people with features that are strange like Theda’s, flawless and cold. There are cats lying in the sun, and a horse that Steve has made look like it’s underwater. There are a few pages of hands, close-ups of flowers, an unfinished portrait of Steve that must have been done with a mirror. And then there’s Bucky again, with a bloody nose and eyes like bruises. It’s recognizably the same person from the earlier drawings, but he looks older and darker and Bucky recoils from the image without meaning to.

“I don’t feel like we’re family,” Steve says. He must have moved closer to look at the drawings while Bucky was flipping through; his shoulder is touching Bucky’s now, and Bucky wants to jerk away, but he doesn’t. He used to look down at Steve, but now their faces are at the same height. He watches the way Steve’s eyes move as he looks over the drawings. He doesn’t even hear what Steve’s talking about, all he can see is the way Steve’s mouth moves.

“…But we must have been close,” Steve says, and he looks up at Bucky. The sketchbook lies open, balanced on Bucky’s thigh, and he can feel Steve’s hand on top of the book, pressing it down. His breath catches in his throat as his mind registers what Steve said.

“We were friends,” he says, thinking about how close they’re sitting and how Steve’s leaning into him, a hand practically on his thigh. It’s making him uncomfortable to be this close to someone else; his whole body is tense. He grabs the sketchbook out from under Steve’s grasp and closes it, handing it back to Steve. “That’s our home. You’ve got some drawings of your mother and my sister, too.” It makes sense to explain things to this Steve, who’s not really Steve.

“Oh,” Steve says, softly, and he leans back from Bucky (who can suddenly breathe again). “I didn’t recognize… my mother.”

“Oh,” Bucky goes, and he can’t think of what to say to that.

“But I thought she looked familiar,” Steve adds, fiercely. He looks angry in the way that he used to when really he was sad, his eyes shiny with unshed tears.

Bucky thinks that maybe Steve hasn’t remembered that his mother is dead, and then he realizes that Steve was already gone when it happened. That Steve is dead, too, and that Bucky is literally _in a hole in the ground_ with what might as well be the ghost of Steve Rogers. The back of his neck prickles.

“Why can’t you remember?” Bucky asks again, and then he tries to soften it with, “Do you know?”

“I thought this would be enough,” Steve mutters, and then he looks away from the little notebook and back to Bucky. “I thought if I brought this to you, it would, I dunno, break the spell?”

“What spell?” Bucky asks.

“I don’t know if I’m _really_ cursed,” Steve says, “But wouldn’t that explain why everything’s all wrong in my head? It’s like there’s a fog…”

“Do you remember my name?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks at him and blinks. His eyes are so blue and so focused, and Bucky wants to look away but he can’t, and he can feel his face growing hot.

“James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve says, quietly, almost to himself. “Is that your true name? Or is it Bucky? You’re really in there, aren’t you, Bucky?”

Talk of true names makes Bucky uncomfortable, even if it is all superstitious nonsense. “Your name is Steven Grant Rogers,” Bucky says, in a rush, and he watches Steve’s eyes widen.

“That _is_ my name,” he says, and he smiles. “I was born in Brooklyn.” He runs through a host of biographical details, things about getting his teeth knocked out and having asthma (“psychosomatic”) and throwing up because of the Cyclone, things that Bucky wouldn’t consider the really important parts of Steve, ending with, “And you’ve always been there for me.”

“’Til the end of the line,” Bucky says, and then he feels like a sap.

_(A train rushes through the mountains and it’s bitterly cold and the world is about to end and Steve is holding onto him, the only thing holding onto him, until suddenly there’s nothing there and he’s tumbling downwards at a terrible speed, and he can hear Steve’s screams cut off as the train rounds a bend and he thinks to himself, incredibly calm, this is it: the end of the line.)_

“I knew you could fix it,” Steve says, and he’s giving Bucky this look like Bucky is wonderful.

“What did I fix?”

“I had to find an answer,” Steve says, and then his shoulders go tense. “Oh, I forgot – I can’t stay here for too long. They don’t know about you, Bucky, and I think that’s important. But I promise, I can find you again.”

“What? You’re leaving?”

“Not really,” Steve says, looking over his shoulder. He throws Bucky one last grin, and for a moment, Bucky can feel it too, that everything has been set right again. But then he’s standing by himself outside of the horse paddock and he feels so alone that it hurts, as bad as it hurt the first time he realized he was never going to see Steve again.

 

**&**

Steve doesn’t have to pay for anything at the market. Each stall offers something new; many strangers, selling fresh fruit, cakes and jams, candles, fine clothing, roasting meat, mead, live flowers, bundles of dried flowers, and jewelry. It’s astonishing to Steve, now that he remembers going hungry. He remembers having nothing and scraping by, wishing that he looked old enough to get a job, but when there were no jobs, grown men and women were doing the work of children. Bucky was going to get a job –

These thoughts come to him like fireflies, a momentary illumination followed by a darkness that seems purer and more perfectly distilled because something was _there_ before. There are times when he doesn’t know who Bucky is, when he couldn’t tell you quite the name of the place where he used to live. Every time he sees the sketchbook he starts to remember, and so he always leaves it somewhere he will find it again. Right now, it’s in a small pouch that hangs inside his tunic.

It’s impossible to say how much time has passed. When Steve finds Bucky to talk, he is surely crawling deeply inside of his own head and speaking to his memories, or a dream. He imagines that somewhere the real Bucky is struggling to stay seated long enough to finish his homework, without Steve there to keep him focused; in every memory, Bucky is running or laughing or showing Steve how his father taught him to shoot, doodling when he should be paying attention, the first one out of the room when the bell rings. And then he’d be there, outside, waiting for Steve, the only time he could stay still. There’s a bitterness in that thought, but his mind skips over it. It’s better just to remember Bucky and to think that somewhere he is happy.

He has strange dreams where they do not speak, where Bucky is standing in a dark room, in front of a mirror – the wallpaper has a floral pattern – there is no light, and no windows, and it might be a hallway, but there is a mirror, and everything is shadows and soft darkness, and the wood creaks beneath their feet, but it’s not clear how he can hear that when there’s this thundering music in his head, like the organ at church, and Bucky stands in front of the mirror holding the long stem of a calla lily and his hair falls over his shoulders, his chest bare, and there’s something wrong – something is not what it should be – his hair was never that long, was it? But it’s not that, it’s too dark to see, but isn’t one of his arms—? Anyway, it’s only a dream. A seriously weird dream.

He eats a freshly baked biscuit with melting butter and a drizzle of honey. He’s sitting on a smooth, flat stone to eat, watching all the other people. There’s a group of older men (and one woman with greying hair in thick braids down her back) playing instruments, a tenor with a sweet voice singing in a language that sometimes makes sense to Steve.

He doesn’t know why they’re not making him pay, but it’s nice, since he doesn’t really have much money. He was just thinking about something, but he’s not sure what. As he’s trying to puzzle it out, trying to remember what he was doing before he sat down, he feels the unfamiliar weight of the book in the folds of his clothing and wonders what it could be.

 

**&**

 

Bucky gets a special outfit for being a champion. He’s wearing a tartan cloak and trousers, but his chest is bare to display the strange designs painted across his skin. He has similar blue paint on his face and kind of wishes there were a mirror so he could see how dopey he looks. He doesn’t say anything, because Theda seems pleased with herself. ( _Don’t think about the men you killed_ , he tells himself, and thinks about the thin red lines in the whites of their eyes and the lime smell of their hair and their crooked yellow teeth and the smell of their sweat and the paint on their faces and how wet it was when he killed them, and he has to tell himself that maybe the paint on his face means that he will die, too, and is that the worst thing he can imagine? Is it?)

She’s also given him iron cuffs with interweaving symbols plated in gold, what Bucky would guess are trees and animals. He has to put them on himself because iron hurts everyone here, which explains why she’s also given him a small dagger with a pitted and dull iron blade. The head of his spear is iron as well, he knows, and he wonders if he’s about to take on an army single-handedly.

If so, there won’t be much of Bucky left to rescue Steve. 

The whole thing is so ludicrous that he wants to laugh. He’s not even afraid. One of the girls, the one with violet eyes, tells him that he’d be beautiful, if he weren’t a human, and even that makes him laugh. She looks shy when she tells him, and she startles when he begins to cackle, so he calms himself down and says, “Thank you,” like his mother taught him.

She ducks her head and hurries away, and he assumes it’s the last time they’ll ever meet or speak.

Theda’s wearing soft white cloth wrapped around her head like a turban, with long strands of tiny pearls hanging from both sides of her face. She has on heavy, dark makeup, like a silent picture star. Her bodice is beaded, and several layers of transparent blue and purple silk fall to her feet and trail behind her.

A thought comes to him unbidden: the pearls are teeth. Were teeth. He doesn’t know what to make of this thought.

He kind of assumes that whenever they get where they’re going, there’s just going to be an army standing there, staring back at them. Somehow, it still doesn’t bother him; maybe there’s something in the paint affecting him through his skin.

They ride out to the crossroads. The air gets thick and heavy, and Bucky’s clothing and hair begin to swirl and ripple as if carried by unseen currents. It’s even hard for him to breathe, completing the sensation that he’s been submerged. The same thing is happening to Theda, her pearls and skirts, and their horses’ manes. Theda’s speaking, he sees. They’ve stopped in the center of the crossroads. The horses snort and paw at the ground, their movements slow and fluid. It feels as if something is pressing him down and simultaneously pulling him in different directions. He can’t tell if he’s really staying still.

And then they turn and ride, and it seems to him that they’ve taken the same direction they came from.

 _It didn’t work_ , he thinks, and he begins to feel relief.

And then the ground changes. It’s not a packed dirt path, but cobblestones. Instead of ash and birch and willow trees, there are small buildings. Children and cats and goats run in circles as they pass. Dogs bark. They pass a procession of hooded men(?) in thick, dark robes. He can hear the hammering of a blacksmith, somewhere, and the rushing of a creek. When he thinks about the water, he realizes that his head has entirely cleared. Everyone stops to in their tracks to watch as Theda and Bucky pass. Some of the children shriek. Are they laughing, or frightened?

Eventually, they descend from the horses at a stable. The man, wearing – tweed? – who takes their horses’ reins stares at Bucky’s iron accoutrements with a look of bald dislike. But he gives them both little bows and mumbles things that seem to be meant to sound polite.

On foot, out of earshot, Bucky asks, “What did you mean, pay a tithe? Where are we?”

“Finally, the questions,” she says with one of her sly smiles. “We’ve been paying the tithe for centuries, and we are still dying. I say, why pay it? Why sacrifice your friend? We need people to believe in us, my dear, we don’t need an industrial revolution.”

“Sacrifice my friend?”

“I told you, we’re here to put a stop to it.”

“Sacrifice – sacrifice my friend? Steve?” He can hear himself gibbering, but he can’t stop. “What do you mean, sacrifice? Is he here? Where is he? How do we put a stop to it?”

“Be calm, mighty warrior,” Theda says.

Bucky doesn’t think any of the books he read said anything about faeries rolling their eyes.   

 

**&**

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one of the things I'm struggling with is that I really am not an expert on folklore, and when I've tried to do some research, I find myself overwhelmed by how much there is to know and how much I don't. but this chapter put me a bit back on firmer ground, because I was able to look up things like [a history of parks in Brooklyn](https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/before-they-were-parks/brooklyn) and [the Tree Council of Ireland](http://treecouncil.ie/). also, I had this idea about tithes in my head and I was trying to figure out where that came from, and then I was like, "oh, this is Tam Lin. this is just that story again." I hope I'm telling it well... thanks for sticking with me :)


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